are
weird, Frank. And yeah, it’s going to get complicated down the road, when someone wants to get married or whatever. But, like you said yourself, they’re young. They’re not thinking that way yet.”
“Yeah, well, little Justin won’t be getting married any time soon, not without a major change in the legislation—”
“Stop being a cliché, Frank. What’s the big deal?” This didn’t mean it had to be one of the four of them, not necessarily; the evidence still added up to Lexie being stabbed by someone she had met outside the house. It didn’t even mean she had actually been going to sell. If she had made a deal with Ned and then changed her mind, told him she was backing out; if she had just been playing with him all along—
loathing
—yanking his chain to pay him back for trying to take the house . . . He had wanted Whitethorn House badly enough to spit on his grandfather’s memory; what would he have done if a share of it had been so close he could taste it, and then Lexie had snatched it away? I tried to shove the diary out of my mind: those dates, the first N just a few days after that missing circle; the hard scribble, pen almost digging through the paper, that said she hadn’t been playing.
“Well,” Frank said, with the lazy note to his voice that means he’s at his most dangerous. “If you ask me, this could give us the motive we’ve been looking for. Me, I’d call that a big deal.”
“No,” I said promptly, maybe too promptly, but Frank didn’t comment. “Not a chance. Where’s the motive in that? If they all wanted to sell and she was blocking it, then maybe, but those four would rather pull out their own teeth with rusty pliers than sell that house. What have they got to gain by killing her?”
“One of them dies, his share—or hers—reverts back to the other four. Maybe someone figured a quarter of that lovely big house would be even nicer than a fifth. It more or less lets Danny Boy out—if he wanted the whole thing, he could’ve just kept it to start with. But that still leaves us with three little Indians.”
I wriggled round the other way on my branch. I was very glad that Frank was off target, but, illogically, the extent to which he didn’t get it was pissing me off. "What
for
? Like I said, they don’t want to sell it. They want to
live
in it. They can do that just as well no matter what percentage they own. You think one of them killed her because he liked her bedroom better than his own?”
“Or her own. Abby’s a good kid, but I’m not ruling her out. Or maybe it wasn’t financial, for once; maybe Lexie was just plain driving someone nuts. People share a house, they get on each other’s tits. And remember, there’s a very good chance she was shagging one of the lads, and we all know how nasty that can turn. If you’re renting, no big deal: some yelling, a few tears, a house meeting, one of you moves out. But what do you do if it’s a co-owner? They can’t throw her out, I doubt any of them can afford to buy her out—”
“Sure,” I said, “except I haven’t got one single whiff of any kind of major tension aimed at me. Rafe was pissed off with me at first for not realizing how shaken up they all were, but that’s
it.
If Lexie had been getting up someone’s nose to the point of murder, there’s no way I could have missed it. These people
like
each other, Frank. They may be weird, but they like being weird together.”
“So why didn’t they tell us they all own the place? Why are they being so fucking secretive, unless they’re hiding something?”
“They didn’t tell you because you never asked them. If you were in their place, even if you were innocent as a baby, would you give the cops anything you didn’t have to? Would you even spend hours answering questions, the way they have?”
“You know what you’re talking like?” Frank said, after a pause. He had stopped pacing. “You’re talking like a defense attorney.”
I twisted round the other way again, swung my feet up against a branch. I was having a hard time staying still. “Oh, come on, Frank. I’m talking like a
detective.
And you’re talking like a fucking obsessive. If you don’t like these four, that’s fine. If they twang your antennae, that’s fine too. But it doesn’t mean that every single thing you find is automatically evidence that they’re stone-cold killers.”
“I don’t think you’re in any position to question my objectivity, babe,” Frank said. That lazy drawl had come back into his voice, and it made my back tense up against the tree trunk.
“What the hell is that supposed to mean?”
“It means I’m on the outside, keeping my perspective, while you’re neck-deep in all the action, and I’d like you to keep that in mind. It also means I think there’s a limit to how far ‘Oh, they’re just charmingly eccentric’ will go as an excuse for acting downright bloody squirrely.”
“What brought this on, Frank? You’ve counted them out since the beginning, two days ago you were all over Naylor like a rash—”
“And I still am, or I will be as soon as we find the little bastard again. But I like spreading my bets. I’m not dropping anyone, anyone at all, until they’re definitively ruled out. And these four haven’t been. Don’t forget that.”
It was way past time for me to back off. “Fair enough,” I said. “Until Naylor turns up again, I’ll focus on them.”
“You do that. So will I. And keep watching yourself, Cassie. Not just outside that house; inside, too. Talk tomorrow.” And he was gone.
The fourth big L: love. I thought, suddenly, of the phone videos: a picnic on Bray Head, the summer before, all of them lying on the grass drinking wine out of plastic cups and eating strawberries and arguing lazily over whether Elvis was overrated. Daniel had gone into a long absorbed monologue about sociocultural context, until Rafe and Lexie decided everything was overrated except Elvis and chocolate and started throwing strawberries at him. They had been passing the camera phone around; the clips were disjointed and shaky. Lexie with her head in Justin’s lap and him tucking a daisy behind her ear; Lexie and Abby sitting back to back and looking out at the sea, hair blowing, shoulders lifting in long matching breaths; Lexie laughing up into Daniel’s face as she picked a ladybug out of his hair and held it out, him bending his head over her hand and smiling. I had seen the video so many times that it felt like my own memory, flickering and sweet. They had been happy, that day, all five of them.
There had been love there. It had looked solid and simple as bread; real. And it felt real to live in, a warm element through which we moved easily and which we breathed in with every breath. But Lexie had been ready and willing to blow all that sky-high. More than willing; hell-bent on it—that furious scrawl in the date book, while the phone video showed her climbing down from the attic laughing and covered in dust. If she had lived a couple of weeks longer, the others would have woken up one morning and found her gone, not a note, not a good-bye, not a second thought. It slid through a back corner of my mind that Lexie Madison had been dangerous, under that bright surface, and that maybe she still was.
* * *
I slid off my branch, hanging by my hands, dropped and landed in the lane with a thump. I dug my hands into my pockets and started walking—moving helps me think. The wind pulled at my cap and shoved into the small of my back, almost taking me off my feet.
I needed to talk to Ned, fast. Lexie had neglected to leave me instructions on how the hell they got in touch with each other. Not by mobile: Sam had pulled her phone records first thing, no unidentified numbers in or out. Carrier pigeon? Notes in the hollow tree? Smoke signals?
I didn’t have much time. Frank had no idea that Lexie had ever met Ned and no idea that she had been getting ready to blow town—I knew there would turn out to be a good reason why I didn’t want to tell him about that diary; just like he always says, your instincts work faster than your mind. But he wasn’t about to let go of this. He would worry away at it like a pit bull, and sooner or later he was going to hit on this same possibility. I didn’t know all that much about Ned, but enough to be pretty sure that, if he ended up in an interview room with Frank going at him full throttle, he would spill his guts inside five minutes. It never once occurred to me, not for a second, to sit back and let that happen. Whatever had been going on here, I needed to put my finger on it before Frank did.
If I wanted to make an appointment to meet Ned, without any chance of the others finding out, how would I do it?
No phones. Mobiles keep a call register and they get itemized bills, she wouldn’t have left anything like that lying around, and Whitethorn House didn’t have a landline. There was no pay phone within walking distance, and the ones in college were risky: the Arts block phones were the only ones close enough to use on a fake bathroom break, and if one of the others had happened to walk by at the wrong moment, she would have been fucked—and this was too important for gambles. No calling in to see him, either. Frank had said Ned lived in Bray and worked in Killiney, there was no way she could have got there and back without the others missing her. And no letters or e-mails; she would never, not in a million years, have left a trail.
“How the hell, girl?” I said softly, into the air. I felt her like a shimmer over my shadow on the lane, the tilt of her chin and the mocking sideways flash of her eyes:
Not telling.
Somewhere along the way I had stopped noticing just how seamlessly conjoined their five lives were. Into college together, all day in the library together, smoke break at noon with Abby and at four with Rafe, lunch together at one, home together for dinner: the routine of it was choreographed as precisely and tightly as a gavotte, never a minute left unaccounted for and never a minute to myself, except—
Except now. For one hour a night, like some spellbound girl in a fairy tale, I unwound my life from the others’ and it was all my own again. If I were Lexie and I wanted to contact someone I should never have been contacting, I would use my late-night walk.
Not
would:
had. For weeks now I had been using it to phone Frank, phone Sam, keep my secrets safe. A fox skittered across the lane in front of me and vanished into the hedge, all bones and luminous eyes, and a shiver went down my back. Here I had thought this was my very own bright idea, I was making my own way step by step and alert through the dark. It was only now, when I turned around and looked back down the road, that I realized I had been blithely, blindly putting my feet smack in Lexie’s footprints, all the way.
“So?” I said aloud, like a challenge. “So what?” This was what Frank had sent me in for, to get close to the victim, get into her life, and—duh—I was doing it. A certain amount of creepy was not only beside the point but also pretty much par for the course on a murder investigation; they’re not supposed to be one long round of laughs. I was getting spoiled, all these cozy candlelight dinners and handicrafts, turning jumpy when reality kicked back in.
One hour to get hold of Ned. How?
Notes in the hollow tree . . . I almost laughed out loud. Professional deformation: you’ve got the most esoteric possibilities all worked out, it’s the simple ones that take forever to hit you. The higher the stakes, Frank once told me, the lower the technology. If you want to meet your mate for coffee, you can afford to arrange it by text message or e-mail; if you think the cops or the Mob or the Illuminati are closing in, you signal your contact with a blue towel on the washing line. For Lexie, days ticking away and morning sickness starting to kick in, the stakes must have felt like life and death.
Ned lived in Bray; only a fifteen-minute drive away, outside rush hour. Probably she had taken the risk of phoning him from college, the first time. After that, all she had needed was a safe drop spot, somewhere in these lanes, that both of them could check every couple of days. I must have walked straight past it a dozen times.
That shimmer again, in the corner of my eye: tip of a grin, there and tricky and then gone.
In the cottage? The Bureau gang had been all over it like flies on shite, dusted every inch for prints and found nothing. And he hadn’t been parked anywhere near the cottage, that night I’d followed him. Allowing a little leeway for the fact that God forbid you should drive your Monster Truck on the kind of roads for which it was constructed, he would have parked as close to the drop spot as he could get. He had been on the main Rathowen road, nowhere near any turnoff. Wide verges, long grass and brambles, the dark road dropping away over the brow of the hill; and the milestone, worn and leaning like a tiny grave-marker.
I hardly realized I had turned around and was running hard. The others would be expecting me back any minute and the last thing I wanted was for them to get worried and come looking for me, but this couldn’t wait till tomorrow night. I wasn’t racing some hypothetical, infinitely flexible deadline any more; I was racing against Frank’s mind, and Lexie’s.
After the narrow lanes, the verge felt wide and bare and very exposed, but the road was deserted, not a glimmer of headlights in either direction. When I pulled out my torch, the letters on the stone marker jumped out at me, blurred with time and weather, throwing their own slanted shadows:
Glenskehy 1828.
The grass swirled and bent around it, in the high wind, with a sound like a long hiss of breath.
I caught the torch under my arm and parted the grass with both hands; it was wet and sharp-edged, tiny serrations pulling at my fingers. At the foot of the stone, something flashed crimson.
For a moment my mind couldn’t take in what I was seeing. Sunk deep in the grass, colors glowed bright as jewels and minute figures scudded away from the torchlight: gloss of a horse’s flank, flick of a red coat, toss of powdered curls and a dog’s head turning as he leaped for cover. Then my hand touched wet, gritty metal and the figures shivered and clicked into place, and I laughed out loud, a small gasp that sounded strange even to me. A cigarette tin, old and rusty and probably nicked from Uncle Simon’s stash; the rich, battered hunting scene was painted with a brush fine as an eyelash. The Bureau and the floaters had done a fingertip search for a mile around the cottage, but this was outside their perimeter. Lexie had beaten them, saved this for me.
The note was on lined paper torn out of some kind of Filofax thing. The handwriting looked like a ten-year-old’s, and apparently Ned hadn’t been able to decide whether he was writing a business letter or a text message: